You're losing your memory now
by TheMidnightDesire
Summary: John's hand in his was warm, and seemed to be all that is real in the universe. Sherlock didn't even know how much. - One-shot. Angst.


**Disclaimer: **Neither the characters nor the song is my propriety and I am having no profit with any of this work.

**Song:** Losing your memory - Ryan Star

**Notes: **I have had this idea a long time ago, along many headcanons on Tumblr - I really don't know where anymore - but only recently I found a way to turn it into a story, and here it is.

I know many people don't like songfics, but Losing your memory is becoming a classic in fandoms and it fits perfectly.

I am Brazilian, and this fanfiction is already published in Portuguese. This is not my first story in English, but I think it is the most adequate so far, and it is the only one published in this site. I would like to greatly thank Hoodoo for the beta work and for helping me to adapt this to the language - but all the mistakes are on me. Please feel free to point out where I may have gone wrong, but be aware of the situation from the start.

Hope you enjoy.

* * *

**You're losing your memory now**

_Call all your friends_

_Tell them you're never coming back._

_'Cause this is the end,_

_Pretend that you want it_

_Don't react._

John's hand in his was warm, and seemed to be all that is real in the universe.

Sherlock didn't even know how much.

_Please, don't be… dead._

The ownerless voice echoing inside his head was the most lucid thing in existence for him before the light.

A light so bright the whiteness of it shone through his half-opened eyelids.

A light so strong that even Sherlock's skeptical brain would believe it was the gates of the biblical paradise.

His body hitched a deep breath to confirm that he indeed had lungs.

Heaven could not hurt so deep inside his eyes, and the images began to shade his view, taking on indescribable shapes.

Then the light was no longer so strong, it was only fluorescent. His heart beat electronically, accompanied in time by a monitor. He was looking at a white and disjointed multitude of geometric squares that he could only identify as a roof several minutes later.

Astonishment could not begin to describe what was going on inside Sherlock's head. It was more like a tornado ripping in half a city full of buildings, throwing car-sized debris all around and downing to the eye of the storm all the sense, all the perfect architecture, all the roads, streets, houses and gardens.

All this inside a motionless body on a bed, breathing faintly and barely opening his eyes.

He looked to his side and his sight captured a transparent plastic bag with fluid. Tubing snaked down from it to him, but where it connected to him, he could not see. The storm raged too much inside Sherlock for him to properly pay attention to the outside world. His sharp reasoning had not yet returned. All his memories, as shapeless and flitting as dreams, were diffuse nebulae orbiting the eternal immensity of his mind. Perhaps to understand it, to read the memories and thoughts that constellated his brain, it would have been necessary to have studied a particular astronomy.

In the palpable level of the existence, there was the serum falling drop by drop into the drip chamber and, in effect, into him. A thin blanket covered his body.

His head leaned to the side and his eyes followed a tube, which led to the catheter in his hand. He tried to move his fingers, and he was not sure he had done it. It seemed like a delay in performance, such as a machine with overload or software with a virus. His breathing accelerated, and he felt his heartbeat, the electronic outline of which had been an unchanging rhythm, show unusual alterations. The information rushed through his brain with the violence of molecules in a chemical reaction. The first time they clashed in a sentence, it nearly exploded inside his mind with bright and exact words.

_What went wrong?_

He was in a damn hospital.

He was alive, and not in the way he wanted to be.

He was sure he had seen his own tombstone. He'd bet his life again that he had not directly hit the ground, the same way as he always easily bet that he was right in every situation. He didn't own that kind of doubt. He was trying to remember, therefore, how he had been hospitalized, but everything was mixing up everything that happened between the time he fell and the time he met John.

John.

"Nurse-" The call died dry in his throat, as if it had been extinguished. Sherlock coughed weakly and his throat was arid. It seemed that his vocal cords were the dusty and loosened strings on a forgotten guitar inside a dark closet.

His hand barely responded, making it a little pointless to try to push the button on the panel located next to the bed to call someone. Still, he tried to force his arm. As it were, he didn't need to press anything; his medical equipment detected the sudden oscillation in his respiratory and cardiac rhythm, it alerted the staff and demanded someone's presence.

Someone opened the door; a young woman, light-colored eyes and olive skin, carrying medicine bottles on a stainless steel tray. She glanced to the bed and to the patient, and nearly dropped the medication on her hands.

"Sweet Jesus!"

Her expression was just as if she has seen the Savior she prayed to every night or the devil in skin and bone, but Sherlock could see that it was the way she always reacted to surprises. Hardly professional, he concluded in the next instant.

"Hello," Sherlock replied, less for courtesy and more to ensure himself able to establish a vocal contact.

"You are awake!"

"That's an understatement," he was able to answer.

She looked even more stunned than he was, and she couldn't find the correct way to address him.

"I seem to be unable to move," Sherlock finally said. "Have I suffered spinal damage?"

"No, no, sir!" She immediately came over and stood next to his bed. "Your spine is intact. You've been unconscious for a long time and your muscles have atrophied. Also, your bodily responses are slower than what your brain commands. This is part of the sluggishness."

"What happened?" Sherlock's words slurred together, trying to find the speed that once had been so usual.

"I'll call your doctor, he will be able to give you all the information," she replied, then reached her pocket and lifted her pager with the rush of one pulling an oxygen mask. "Doctor Watson, you are needed in room 221 of the B ward. Stat."

"John?"

The muscles of his back seemed to react and to try to pull him into a sitting position. Patient and nurse stared at the monitor that counted the heartbeats and saw the lines lifting up into smaller intervals.

Simultaneously reprimanding him from trying to sit up and pushing a toggle switch on the bed rail, she raised a bit the back of the bed so that he could stay seated. Then she started her standard procedures, checking reflexes and vital signs, which became erratic by the restlessness of Sherlock.

"Is he all right? And Mrs. Hudson? Lestrade, are they alive?" he demanded.

"Everyone is all right, Mr. Holmes," she said with a tone of someone who actually had no idea what he was talking about.

"You don't know what happened to them. Or even me," he said dryly, as a statement of fact.

She gave a smile that was meant to be reassuring, but conveyed exactly the opposite. Sherlock merely frowned.

"The thing is, you have been in this hospital longer I have."

Her response confirmed Sherlock's assertion: She really had no idea. The nurse held the man's hand and he would have pulled it back if he could, but again his muscles didn't respond.

"I've been in a coma? For how long?"

"Sorry, you must wait for the doctor. Your case is more complicated than I should try to explain."

"ANSWER ME!"

The demand made his throat hurt and was accompanied by clenching his fists. The nurse wrenched her hand away from his in pain. His hands closed tightly and his fingernails dug into his palms.

He concluded that he could feel pain. Among all the multitude of pieces that went on indefinitely sliding and mixing in his perception, he could distinguish that one sting.

"Three years, Mr. Holmes," she finally answered, placing the stethoscope in her ears. "You have been comatose for three years."

He could actually feel pain.

_The damage is done_

_The police are coming_

_Too slow now._

As despair hovered and made his throat tight, Sherlock could not draw a timeline of what happened in his life. It was as if thieves had plundered his mind palace, leaving behind nothing but overturned furniture and shattered windows.

He let himself be examined. He was trying to make his brain make sense again in amongst the rubble, but it seemed, however, far above his power.

What could his hospital room tell him?

The tray supporting the machinery and the IV pole holding the serum had numerous scratches on the metal, the result of the numerous times it was switched before being replaced. There were marks on the ground; he wanted to be able to see further, but did not feel able to move his body. By the slight scratches he could see, he would say that a chair was often placed next to his bed—the black chair that was next to the dresser.

There was a book by the nightstand; cover down, no synopsis. The design told him it was a storybook, which was confirmed by the way the pages inside were handled, as the result of the volume being kept opened for a long time in someone's hand, but not fixed on a single page. A fiction book.

There was a glass vase beside it, which had once accommodated some flower, but so long ago that that even the remnants of leaf and petal inside couldn't allow Sherlock to identify it.

Slowly, he bent his legs very slightly, only to conclude that they maintained his physical therapy.

Mycroft was able to afford it.

He had barely released his body back on the bed when the door opened once again.

Under the doorway, a blond doctor in a lab coat leaning on a cane, his steadied face marked by a pair of incredulous deep dark blue eyes.

"Oh, God," escaped through the doctor's thin lips.

No hysteria, no shock; nothing but bewilderment.

And Sherlock could blame what he wanted—the coma, the drugs, the accident that may have led him up there, anything. What was happening, however, was that the feeling of what he saw could terrify him.

Or what _didn't_ see.

Sherlock could not recognize him.

"You're awake!"

The softly nasal voice fitted perfectly to Sherlock's perception, as did the obvious phrase.

Sherlock knew it was him. As the doctor walked into the room, he knew the sound of his footsteps.

A step a little more flawed than the next.

A limp.

He knew the voice, the smell of the perfume and shampoo, he was John Hamish Watson.

But Sherlock couldn't recognize his face.

That monitor, the electronic tattletale, again indicated the beginning of a tachycardia.

He closed his eyes and sighed heavily. Too many confused memories. Yes, that was it. His body was more committed in trying to avoid nausea or coming back to unconsciousness than in making things fit into the place they should.

"This is really a miracle!"

Coming into the room and standing beside him, the doctor leaned his cane on the bed and smiled; yet it was a wavering smile, a watery, unsustainable one. He looked worried. More concerned about the fact that patient had awoken than relieved by that same fact.

"Was it Mycroft? Did he intervene? If Lestrade and Mrs. Hudson are alive, it all seems well—"

"Mr. Holmes, calm down. Hey. Hey, I'm here with you." John put a hand on his shoulder. "I'm John Watson, your doctor. You are in Saint Bartholomew's Hospital. You are confused after coming out of your coma. This may bring moments of emotional stress and panic attacks, but there is no need for you to worry. You were brought here in a state of deep unconsciousness—"

"I know! I was in a coma for three years and I'm still in mild state of confusion. Obviously I had been level 1 of the Glasgow Coma Scale, and I am disoriented. This may last for a bit of time. The fact is, I'm not panicking, John, my brain is not idle and you're the one treating me like an idiot!"

His fingernails pierced deeper into his hand and he realized that he was forcing his fingers to close into a fist again.

The doctor was by his side, but yet just out of reach. As if Sherlock was not allowed reach out and touch him. Like a picture from a distance or an optical illusion reflected on the surface of water.

Meanwhile, John's expression was more and more perplexed.

"Can you recognize me?"

Sherlock gritted his teeth and it was unbearable that he just_ didn't know_ how to answer that question.

His eyes scrutinized every inch of the face of the doctor, without missing even a single detail, and yet he couldn't remember. It was as if John Watson didn't have a face for him.

Nevertheless, it did not matter. John existed just because. Sherlock knew so. He could just feel it like the air he breathes.

"What happened to Moriarty's assassins?"

John's countenance melted like water thrown over a sand castle, and Sherlock feared having said too much.

Feared.

He was so fragile that it was obnoxious.

John glanced at the nurse standing by his side with hands clasped behind her back. She just shook her head; moved it from side to side for a moment, as if to say silently No, I don't know what he's talking about.

However, the anxiety that undulated in the doctor's eyes was of one who knew far more than her. He sighed and gestured.

"Could you give us a minute?"

She whispered, "oh, sure", and John walked her to the door. As Sherlock watched the woman go, he considered asking for water, but did not finish the thought or even turn it into a sentence.

When the doctor returned, limping slightly, he pulled the chair beside the dresser. Sherlock 's eyes followed the chair legs follow the exact same path on the ground.

The movement told him that the same chair was often placed next to his bed.

"Tell me what you remember."

"Of the fall, you mean."

"What fall?"

"What do you mean, what fall?"

"Sherlock, how have we met?"

To Sherlock, it had been on a day in the lab. It would be so easily describable, but now he found it all covered by some sort of smoke. By the fog and the lack of faces. It just seemed to lose the sense now that he dared to speak.

"A little different from my day," John had said.

The details. The tan on his hands, but not wrists. The psychosomatic limp. The cellphone.

As his patient was speaking, the doctor felt his strength leaving his body. His mind pictured exactly the lines in the book on the table beside the bed.

"A little different from my day," it was written on page eleven.

When the brief narrative of the man was finished, John had one hand covering his mouth and his eyes were a mixture so full of terror and awe there were no true words for it.

"Well, Mr. Holmes... this is an unprecedented situation for me. Comas are very complex. I must say that I am very, very surprised that you have woken up, but yesterday you had an arrest—" the physician corrected his words. Nearly stuttered. "You had some spikes of tachycardia. This may be a result of a wave of some neural output, which may have been a precursor to you waking up."

Even dazed, even with the muscles nearly unresponsive, Sherlock knew that John was relaying some ready and empty previously set text. The true soul of the indescribable gloom that shadowed his eyes was too telling.

"I mean you don't need to worry about it now," John continued objectively. "I'll order a battery of exams and an urgent MRI. I will say that I never headed a similar case, nor have I witnessed an awakening so violently energetic, but I shouldn't be so surprised. What I know is that I've been a physician for many years and yet I am amazed every day with what I see. The human subconscious can be even more fascinating. Your brother had told me that you are a brilliant mind and that you used to be a detective before it all happened."

The doctor wasn't looking at his patient lying beside him, but to the nightstand beside his bed.

And Sherlock turned his head to look at it, too.

In his field of vision: the glass vase without flowers and the book.

"Is this book yours?" his dry voice whispered.

"Yes," John replied in the same volume.

He stretched his arm feebly, forcing it by willpower alone to the side of the bed. His hand fell on top of the wood and his fingers curled limply in the hardcover.

His muscles trembling, Sherlock had difficulty holding the book.

John stood up, leaning his hands on his knees, staggered slightly and stood beside the bed. He held the book into Sherlock's hand and helped him put it on his lap.

A storybook.

"Your coma was supposed to be irreversible," the doctor explained, "but when the habit is kept of talking to the unconscious, the mental stimulation and contact with the outside world are usually the only bridges that still create some response. It may seem silly, but it is often what brings more results. Things like telling facts about your life or your day, reading the newspaper or... reading fictional stories."

The title on the cover was The Reichenbach Fall.

"They said I was wasting my time, but I came here nearly every day and..."

John did not finish the sentence. Sherlock flipped through the book, his weakened fingers aching with each movement, his face set in a solid and firm expression so steady that the doctor wasn't sure how to read.

"And this is..." Sherlock wouldn't put a question mark after the sentence, but it existed. The doubt existed.

He wanted to ask why there was a story, albeit with different names and characters, that fit perfectly in what he considered to have been parts of his own life.

"This is the last story I have read to you," the doctor said and his voice had an unlikely sweetness, which was all that the patient could grab as the scene faded from the edges.

No emotion could be read on the face of the man lying in the hospital bed, but his fingers were trembling with tense muscles. They had a spasm while holding a page and accidentally tore it up a bit.

It cut in half the sentence describing that, in the top of a building, the main character shed one tear during his last phone call.

"I'm sorry," Sherlock said in an even weaker whisper, looking at the ripped paper.

"No problem."

The look lifted to John was not from the brilliant Sherlock Holmes that, for a high price, had defeated the sordid plan of James Moriarty.

It was of the Sherlock Holmes who had been in a coma hearing stories from his physician for three years.

He concluded that his mind was bright enough to create it all.

And he had never thought before that this conclusion at some point would be so terribly hideous.

"I have never talked to you before, have I, Dr. Watson?"

With a burdened expression, John shook his head.

"You had been brought unconscious to the hospital where I work, with an overdose of intravenous cocaine. It was not reversed by removing the drug from your body."

The doctor's hands, which helped the other to hold the book, held strongest his patient's.

"This is the first time I see your eyes open, Mr. Holmes."

_And I would have died,_

_I would have loved you all my life_

_You're losing your memory now_

It was as if he was standing on a fjord, on a cliff, but it was only his hospital room. John's voice, which had always been so familiar and so present in his mind, was just a weary echo.

It was like having nothing between steep cliff and barren rocks; it was like shouting until his throat was raw and he kept on screaming until his own blood made him choke. It reverberated into the last moment of the fog, the last hours of the night to the dawn of his mind, when the screams would be swallowed up by the ocean; but it was only the stillness of his hospital room.

His light-colored irises once again rested a meticulous gaze upon the features of the doctor by his side.

Now it made perfect sense that he did not recognize his face; he had never seen it.

The one who is dreaming can't find anything inconsistent inside it.

Then it all was so perfectly obvious that the fog in his post-coma mind was disappearing faster than ever.

"Your brother, Mycroft Holmes, who pays for your treatment, said something about you being a detective, so I brought some of my books and read to you every end of my shift. I told you some personal things, like stories of when I served in Afghanistan, but it was just to add a personal touch."

"You didn't need to," Sherlock whispered with the greatest ethereal tranquility in the world.

"Oh, no, I like it!" The doctor gave a weak laugh. "I love detective stories. I... they are my favorite. I hope you enjoyed it."

"I liked it. I liked these... stories."

Stories.

_Where have you gone,_

_The beach is so cold in winter here._

_And where have I gone,_

_I wake in Montauk with you near_

John did not expect him to remember. He hadn't even imagined that one day his patient would come back and talk about it.

Everything was too personal. Too peculiarly intimate.

Everyone said he shouldn't have hopes. He shouldn't feed fantasies, nor hold on to someone who had never said a word and who'd never wake up again. However, it was not like this. It was an inherent feeling that he was responsible for this man. From the moment had been brought in alone in a hospital gurney, and even more right now.

Unprofessional, people could say. He never minded. John wouldn't let the practicality of the medicine or the days he spent in warfare to numb his sensitivity. And when he sat beside that patient, it was a time to forget his day and to think about adventures and investigations and cases and confidences.

Because if he hadn't done this for Sherlock, no one else would have.

Yet, there, while beside that bed, unsure of what to do and not knowing what may sound silly or unprepared, he really felt much less a doctor and more an old friend.

"You did it all this time because no one came to visited me, didn't you?"

As Sherlock read perfectly his mind, John felt a chill.

"I'm sorry," the doctor just said.

"Don't be."

His voice, however, was as punctual as a raindrop and as calm as a fog.

"I believe that your friends have lost hope a little, but it is somewhat common, and it doesn't mean absolutely-"

"I don't have friends," Sherlock interrupted, his voice cold and systematic. "None. Alone is what I have."

_Remember the day,_

_'Cause this is what dreams Should always be ._

_I just want to stay ,_

_I just want to keep this dream in me_

_You're losing your memory now_

John was glued on the ground. Clung to it, unable to understand why his heart could be aching that much. He began to wonder if he had done something terrible. If he shouldn't have been, for all that time, just another doctor checking vital signs.

"Everything will find its place, okay?" he said, half to his patient and half to himself.

"Congratulations to her."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The gold ring on your finger. Left hand. It's recent."

"Yes." John frowned, turning the ring in the finger with his thumb.

"So I would say that you took a leave for your honeymoon, what made you not coming over here for some time. And yesterday I had an... episode, which can be a cardiac or respiratory situation. You haven't read it through the reports; you were here yesterday. You are still on leave, but answered your pager. You were here and actually asked me to not die, didn't you?

He had heard that sentence. That one hadn't been a dream. He had felt John's hand holding his, not as a manual check of his heartbeats.

"I.. how did you...? Were you awake?"

"Thank you, doctor."

Sherlock took away John's ability to respond properly. The situation was more than just unlikely; He looked... he indeed seemed to be brilliant. He had been awake for less than one hour and was already making correct deductions? Fascinating.

"I just... just did my job."

He hesitated in responding, hearing himself sound like a naïve child.

"No, you did more than that." Sherlock smiled, a stretched and awkward expression that made John wish he had not smiled. "But I want to be alone right now."

"Mr. Holmes..."

"You had some tests to order for me, didn't you?"

John straightened his posture and nodded, a nearly military gesture. "Right ," he murmured, turning turned his back and walking away, internalized in thoughts.

Everything in his conscience said it was not for him to say anything.

"We can... I mean, when you get up, we can go out to talk. A lunch or something. If you'd like."

He said at last, with one hand on the doorframe, contradicting everything his reason had told him.

Of all people, why Sherlock Holmes? Sherlock, of whom he never knew more than short stories.

Sherlock smiled, not exactly a satisfied or happy one, which eventually turned into a laugh.

"What?" John frowned again.

The clear eye of the detective's deviated to the side of the bed, and there was a slight trace of irony in his voice.

"Your cane."

John saw his cane resting by Sherlock's bed.

"Oh!" he blurted out and went back inside the room to pick it up, before returning to the door and leaving the room.

Everything was now taking clarity. Sherlock saw himself kneeling on the floor of his mind palace, collecting fallen memories and separating them from dreams, as one who is forced to throw away diamonds from a pile of rubble just because they don't belong to that place.

The sounds of traffic rose and fell, only to exceed the buzz of silence.

He's rather be anywhere but that hospital room.

He'd rather anything but realizing all he remembered was nothing but a dream guided by the only voice that he thought he knew.

He released his body on the bed again, while sighing profoundly.

John said he would be back soon.

Perhaps...

Perhaps he should just go back to sleep.

_Wake up, it's time, little girl ._

_Wake up_

_All the best of what we've done is yet to come_

_Wake up, it's time, little girl_

_Wake up_

_Just remember who I am in the morning_

_You're losing your memory now_


End file.
